THE STOREFRONT THEATER

Lyons, NE

‘ARCHITECTURE PROJECT OF THE YEAR’ AWARDED TO A TRAVELING ARTIST.

Matthew Mazzotta has won Dezeen’s 'Architecture Project of the Year' award at Tate Modern. Mazzotta, a traveling artist and founding memberof Culturunners, beat some of the most well-known architects in theworld with an unassuming project which brought community life back to anabandoned Main Street in the small town of Lyons, Nebraska. The Storefront Theater also won the ‘Rebirth Project of the year’ award.

"This poetic and powerful project has generated the most interesting conversation and has got us the most excited," said the Dezeen Awards architecture master jury. "Architecture is for the community and this is the project that serves the community the most."

Matthew Mazzotta receiving the Dezeen ‘Architecture Project of the Year’ award from British coimedian and host, Lenny Henry

The
Storefront Theater provides the town of Lyons, Nebraska, with a unique
open-air event space, which can be hidden away and disguised as part of
the streetscape when not in use. Hydraulic cylinders on either side push
down the awning and false frontage over the sidewalk, revealing stepped
seats. A screen can be wheeled in front by a tractor, then driven away
again when necessary. Since the venue was installed, it has hosted
events including movie screenings, video-game nights and music concerts,
, all programed by the local community.

"Both the seats
and the screen retract and disappear when not in use, giving the
impression that there is nothing unusual in this town, leaving only
word-of-mouth accounts for inquiring visitors," said the artist.

Matthew
Mazzotta, an artist who travels around the world to work with
communities, was invited to Nebraska by the Department of Rural Affairs
to work on a site-specific artwork in collaboration with local people.
The result was a 100-seat theatre, which flips down from an unassuming abandoned freestanding storefront in the small Nebraska town.

"During
the process of making the Theater, many community members revealed fond
memories of a once-thriving downtown and expressed a strong desire to
see downtown become the center of community life once again," Mazzotta
said. Locals donated money and volunteered their time to help to
construct the theatre.

The aim of project, at the intersection
of community and sustainability in the built environment, is to help
bring life back to downtown Lyons. With a population of 851, and like
many other small towns in the US, its main street has suffered decline in recent years.

“What
happened in Lyons, Nebraska has happened to communities throughout the
world.” Mazzotta said, “Small Town Main Street has suffered as goods,
services, entertainment—and the jobs that go with them—move away. Today,
the price of bread depends far less than it once did on the cost of
wheat and far more on the cost of packaging, advertising, and
transportation. The mom-and-pop shops that once made up downtowns are
being undercut by international discount retailers that benefit from
economies of scale. Buildings that once housed bowling alleys, barber
shops, bars, theaters, and restaurants also can no longer compete and
have closed their doors. As a result, the social bonds and everyday
experiences that these spaces once provided, have virtually
disappeared.”

The Dezeen judges concluded, "The Storefront
Theater addresses the challenges and opportunities of the changing small
town high street in a joyful, witty and communal way. Whilst in itself
it’s a small architecture gesture, it changes the character of the whole
high street in a meaningful way. It proves that even a simple facade
can be as impactful as a big and expensive architectural gesture."

In
framing the Awards, Architect and Dezeen columnist Sam Jacob stressed
the potential of architecture being politically and emotionally engaged,
rather than being purely about construction. "Thinking about
architecture as the production of walls is to limit its potential power
on the world," Jacob said. "The fact that we can begin to think of it as
a much broader, creative, politically and emotionally engaged practice
is incredibly exciting."

Paloma Strelitz, another jury member
and co-founder of Assemble, said that this year's crop of entries
revealed an increasing interest in consulting the public on the use of
buildings.

"Many people are asking the question of how a broader
range of people can have more agency in how the built environment is
produced and run," Strelitz said.

The Storefront Theater has
also won the Architizers A+ Award in the category of "Architecture +
Community"; World Architecture News (WAN) Awards: in the category of
Adaptive Reuse, 2017; The Chicago Athenaeum – American Architecture
Award; The Congress for the New Urbanism – Charter Award; World
Architecture Community – 20+10+X Award

ABOUT MATTHEW MAZZOTTA:

Matthew
Mazzotta works at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism,
focusing on the power of the built environment to shape our
relationships and experiences. His community-specific public projects
integrate new forms of civic participation and social engagement into
the built environment and reveal how the spaces we travel through and
spend our time living within have the potential to become distinct sites
for intimate, radical, and meaningful exchanges. Through his process,
each project starts by creating temporary public spaces for listening –
‘Outdoor Living Room’ - as a way capture voices from local people that
might not attend more formal meetings. Stemming from this approach are
experiences that involve people from a range of backgrounds working
together to create new models of living that contribute to local culture
beyond the economic realm.

Mazzotta received a BFA from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Masters of Science from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture and
Technology, and is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

ABOUT THE DEZEEN AWARDS

Dezeen
Awards is an annual awards programme organised by the world's most
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designed to identify the world's best architecture, interiors and
design, as well as the studios and the individual architects and
designers producing the most outstanding work. Dezeen Awards are the
benchmark for international design excellence and the ultimate accolade
for architects and designers everywhere.